Macalester Journal of Philosophy Volume 19 Article 8 Issue 1 Spring 2010 10-7-2010 The aN turalistic Epistemology of Hume and Wittgenstein Dawit Dame Macalester College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/philo Recommended Citation Dame, Dawit (2010) "The aN turalistic Epistemology of Hume and Wittgenstein," Macalester Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 19: Iss. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/philo/vol19/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Macalester Journal of Philosophy by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 115 The Naturalistic Epistemology of Hume and Wittgenstein Dawit Dame Introduction David Hume is well known for his skepticism on a wide range of topics, such as causation, the existence of a world external to the mind and the existence of an enduring self. As a result of this, the negative aspect of Hume’s philosophy often clouds the extent to which he wants to ground his epistemology in positive natural facts about humans. Wittgenstein never read Hume and nowhere is it evident that Hume had any influence on Wittgenstein’s works. Perhaps the only influence Hume had on Wittgenstein is simply being a philosopher of a certain tradition that Wittgenstein primarily sought to question. Wittgenstein like Hume, however, is committed the view that human knowledge, philosophical or otherwise, is ultimately grounded in natural facts about human beings. In this paper I will identify and discuss Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s naturalism and argue that both Wittgenstein and Hume seek to ground human knowledge on empirical natural facts about humans. In drawing the parallel between them, I will begin by discussing their respective negative views on knowledge and then focus on those positive views that in each case point towards a naturalism in their philosophy. Since both Wittgenstein and Hume wrote on a wide range of topics, I will only focus on certain important aspects of their philosophy to serve as a tool for understanding their naturalistic philosophical projects. I will particularly focus on Hume’s writing on causation and Wittgenstein’s view on understanding and rule following. 116 1. The Negative View 1.1 Determine? I use the term “negative” primarily to serve as a general term to an aspect of Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy to what some might refer to as skepticism.1 The views discussed below are negative in a sense that they emphasize what is not rather than what is. Since the purpose of this paper is to discuss Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s naturalism, I will briefly discuss some of their negative views only in so far as it serves to illuminate their naturalistic views. To a large extent, very few consider Wittgenstein a skeptic, but skepticism is a term that is often associated with Hume’s writing on causality. I will briefly underline how Hume is not essentially a skeptic and how his naturalism is distinct from skepticism for Hume later on. An aspect of Hume’s philosophy that is considered negative is his view on causality, particularly, the inference from the observed to the unobserved.2 Hume in An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding classifies “all object of human reason or inquiry” into two kinds: relation of ideas and matters of fact (E, 25). He explains that relations of ideas are the kind that are demonstrative. Demonstrative in 1 Wittgensteinian scholarship since the publication of Saul Kripke’s “Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language”, has been divided into pre-Kripke and post Kripke analysis. It is fair to say that Kripke is the first to make an explicit analogy between Hume and Wittgenstein. However, his analogy that compares Hume’s skepticism along with his skeptical solution to Wittgenstein, has received wide array of criticism. My goal in this paper is to discuss Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s naturalism with respect to their “negative” views, and I do not intend to address the finer points of a Kripkean comparison of the two. 2 Barry Stroud, Hume (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1977), 42. 117 the sense that their negation implies a contradiction. These, as Hume points out, are the type that we find in “sciences of geometry, algebra, and arithmetic”. For instance, the proposition “[t]hat the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the squares of the two sides…” (E, 25) is a form demonstrative reasoning. According to Hume, “the certainty and evidence of” the relation of ideas holds “ though there never were a circle or triangle in nature”. (E, 25). Matters of fact, on the other hand are propositions whose negation does not lead to a contradiction. A proposition that claims “[t]hat the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation that it will rise.” (E, 25-26). Hume asserts that “all reasoning concerning matter of fact seems to be founded on the relation of cause and effect”—after observing events of type A and type B, we infer B to follow from a single event A. Essentially, multiple constant conjunctions between events form the basis of inference from an observed single event A to the unobserved event B. Hume points out that matters of fact reasoning by their very nature take the form of a chain of justifications. Within the realm of posteriori reasoning, a reason given for a certain event C is based on a fact B and the reason for the fact B is followed by a fact A. A present event C is justified by a chain of inter-temporal reasoning that extends backward into the past. A reasoning of this nature, therefore, relies on “the relation of cause and effect and that this relation is near or remote, direct or collateral.”( E. 27). A reasoning of this kind is posteriori because one cannot establish the connection between cause and effect without necessarily having had an experience where a series of events A are followed by events B. It follows logically that cause and effects could not be “discovered by a priori 118 arguments.” Therefore, “every effect is a distinct event from its cause” and any “conception” of its cause through a priori argument “must be entirely arbitrary.” (E, 29). What is at stake here is the idea of necessary connection between events A and B. Hume wants to say that there is nothing to be discovered, even with the employment of demonstrative reasoning, that from an observed event A the unobserved event B necessarily follows. There is no necessary connection between a cause and its effect; it is impossible to infer any specific effect from just a single instance of the cause. Only through repeated observations of events A being followed by events B can we infer B having observed A. Wittgenstein’s negative view could be illustrated based on instances of his views on understanding. The idea of rule following is embedded in what is considered human understanding. Our notion of understanding entails grasping a certain rule or direction and properly following it in all circumstances considered. But what does it really mean to understand, to follow a rule, Wittgenstein asks? Wittgenstein imagines a scenario where A is writing a series of numbers and B tries to guess what comes next by coming up with a formula: But are the processes which I have just described here understanding? “B understands the principle of the series” surely doesn’t mean simply: the formula “an=…” occurs to B. For it is perfectly imaginable that the formula should occur to him and that he should nevertheless not understand. “He understands” must have more in it than: the formula occurs to him. And equally, more than any of those 119 more or less characteristic accompaniments or manifestations of understanding. (PI 152). Here Wittgenstein points to an important aspect of what we take to be understanding. The use of the word “occur” is supposed to signify that understanding might be thought of as a form of mental picture that comes to mind. However, this is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for understanding since it is imaginable that the formula could appear in his mind but he may not understand in the sense that the subject still might not be able to continue with the series. In short, the picture fails to determine his future use. Wittgenstein therefore considers the possibility that understanding must be more than the apparent “manifestations” or “accompaniments” of understanding, such as the occurrence of a formula in the head. The latter point is fleshed out in another passage: Whence comes the idea that the beginning of a series is a visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity? Well, we might imagine rails instead of a rule. And infinitely long rails correspond to the unlimited application of a rule. (PI 218). This picture of rules as rails is a metaphor that captures our ordinary conception of understanding of a rule. When we understand a rule, it is assumed that future applications of it could be read off, so to say, from it, the rails serving as future applications of the rule. Thus, we would be inclined to say that we can use a concept at any point in time tn in the future. But how does a rule contain its application? Wittgenstein presents this perplexity in a rather ‘absurd” situation where “a person naturally reacted to the 120 gesture of pointing “by looking in the direction of the line from the finger-tip to the wrist, not from the wrist to finger- tip.”.